Monthly Archives: May 2013

Infinity Ward have released a behind the scenes preview video for their first next-gen title, Call Of Duty: Ghosts. There has been some discussion online as to whether the current-gen Battlefield 4 has a superior level of graphics quality than Call Of Duty: Ghosts. It’s still early days for next-gen though, so hopefully we will have better idea later in the year. In the meantime, it’s always great to see the various stages of great artwork in development.

Infinity Ward Executive Producer Mark Rubin and the Call of Duty: Ghosts development team discuss the all-new world, story and characters, and take you inside the new, next-gen engine.

Everyday is Play is a book to celebrate the game—uniting artists and gamers across the globe. The book looks to bring together talent from across all creative fields who have drawn inspiration from video games. They are now open to submissions, so if you have any game related work that you would like featured in the book then visit Game Paused to appear alongside the impressive list of contributors below.

We are looking for creatives from all fields to take part in a celebration of the video game, works to be featured in a printed publication for release towards the end of 2013. It will showcase the works of designers, musicians, artists, writers and developers that have taken inspiration from the art that we grew up with. Through a series of features and interviews, covering everything from fan art to game modifications, we aim to provide not only a beautiful book but a wealth of true creative play.

Autodesk have uploaded a fascinating presentation by Judd Simantov on the character rigging and modelling techniques used by Naughty Dog in the upcoming survival action game, The Last of Us.

Judd Simantov, 3D artist and Co-founder of Game Character Academy, presents his work on Naughty Dog’s latest project, The Last of Us. His presentation shows the techniques he used in modeling and rigging the game’s primary characters, and he covers special considerations for artists who want to maximize realism and evoke an emotional response from players.

There’s some great new concept art, released by Roberts Space Industries, for epic Kickstarter space sim, Star Citizen. It reveals the remains of a human colony on a distant world, in joyfully large resolution.

This is the former colony on Orion III, aka “Armitage.” Armitage was the site of the farthest human colony from Earth… and one of the first targets of the Vanduul menace. Vanduul raids forced the UEE to withdraw from the system, leaving only a small contingent of insular survivalists on the shattered world.

GamesHQMedia has posted a six-minute gameplay video of Watch Dogs, the Ubisoft action game that utilises a smart, in-game user interface to manipulate the near-future Chicago environment. It’s fascinating to see the GUI so deeply integrated into the 3D environment.

In Watch Dogs, players will assume the role of Aiden Pearce, a new type of vigilante who, with the help of his smartphone, will use his ability to hack into Chicago’s central operating system (ctOS) and control almost every element of the city. Aiden will be able to tap into the city’s omnipresent security cameras, download personal information to locate a target, control systems such as traffic lights or public transportation to stop a chase, and more. The city of Chicago is now the ultimate weapon.

Yang Qi, a concept artist from China, has posted up some truly stunning artwork on Weibo, the Chinese social media network. The impressive illustrations created for Asura Online, a beautiful looking MMORPG developed by Tecent Games and Quantum Studios set in a Southeast Asian fantasy world.

Graphical user interface, or GUI, software is a tricky subject in the gamedev world. Many studios have developed their own proprietary solutions, some of which, as I can personally testify, are far from ideal. Scaleform, created by Autodesk, is a middleware solution to the age-old problem. It utilises an off-the-shelf package, in Adobe Flash, that UI artists are familiar with and provides a means for programmers to plug it into their own game code.

Autodesk® Scaleform® enables developers to leverage the power of the Adobe® Flash® tool set to create powerful and immersive user interface environments for video games and beyond. Used in over 1000 titles across all major platforms ranging from AAA titles to casual games, Scaleform provides a streamlined solution to create hardware-accelerated 3D game menus, HUDs, animated textures, in-game videos and mini-games.

Read on to see the Autodesk Gameware GDC 2013 Show Reel and a selection of short videos capturing Scaleform GUI’s in action.

Moving Picture Company CG Supervisor, John Cherniack, has released a trailer for Dust 514: Enter The Vicious Cycle. The CCP Games massively multiplayer first-person shooter is directly connected to the acclaimed science-fiction game EVE Online. The trailer is an intriguing motions graphics piece, animated in Maya using Maya particles and nparticles to create the sand effects. Game characters are simulated in battle through the animated particles, leading to a final reveal of a deadly mercenary.

To follow on from the God Of War: Ascension post, Trion Worlds artist Satoshi Arakawa has posted up character art models from the genre crossing MMO game and TV show Defiance on the same forum, ZBrushCentral. It features a variety of rendered character, creature and robot models, comparing high/low poly and textured/untextured states. It’s great to see the effort and skill that goes into creating the inhabitants of a game like Defiance.

The featured artists are Satoshi Arakawa, John Gotch, Nathan Brock and Allan Lee. Read on to see some of the character art from the thread.

Patrick Murphy from Sony’s Santa Monica Studio has showcased some incredible character models from God of War: Ascension. The software used to sculpt these exceptionally detailed models is Pixologic’s digital sculpting and painting program ZBrush. These and many more awesome character and environment renders have a thread over on ZBrush Central, featuring work by Murphy along with James VanDenBogart, Katon Callaway, Bryan Wynia, Dustin Blattner, Nick Reynolds, Jose Zavala and Jay Machado.